and as worthless
as ever. All this time, the debauched lords and gentlemen and the
shameless ladies danced and gamed and drank, and loved and hated one
another, according to their merry ways.

So little humanity did the government learn from the late affliction,
that one of the first things the Parliament did when it met at Oxford
(being as yet afraid to come to London), was to make a law, called the
Five Mile Act, expressly directed against those poor ministers who, in
the time of the Plague, had manfully come back to comfort the unhappy
people. This infamous law, by forbidding them to teach in any school, or
to come within five miles of any city, town, or village, doomed them to
starvation and death.

The fleet had been at sea, and healthy. The King of France was now in
alliance with the Dutch, though his navy was chiefly employed in looking
on while the English and Dutch fought. The Dutch gained one victory; and
the English gained another and a greater; and Prince Rupert, one of the
English admirals, was out in the Channel one windy night, looking for the
French Admiral, with the intention of giving him something more to do
than he had had yet, when the gale increased to a storm, and blew him
into Saint Helen's. That night was the third of September, one thousand
six hundred and sixty-six, and that wind fanned the Great Fire of London.

It broke out at a baker's shop near London Bridge, on the spot on which
the Monument now stands as a remembrance of those raging flames. It
spread and spread, and burned and burned, for three days. The nights
were lighter than the days; in the daytime there was an immense cloud of
smoke, and in the night-time there was a great tower of fire mounting up
into the sky, which lighted the whole country landscape for ten miles
round. Showers of hot ashes rose into the air and fell on distant
places; flying sparks carried the conflagration to great distances, and
kindled it in twenty new spots at a time; church steeples fell down with
tremendous crashes; houses crumbled into cinders by the hundred and the
thousand. The summer had been intensely hot and dry, the streets were
very narrow, and the houses mostly built of wood and plaster. Nothing
could stop the tremendous fire, but the want of more houses to burn; nor
did it stop until the whole way from the Tower to Temple Bar was a
desert, composed of the ashes of thirteen thousand houses and eighty-nine
churches.

This was a ter